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Penelope Stewart is an artist, curator/writer and publisher whose multi-disciplinary practice encompasses expansive architectural installations/interventions, alternative photography, artist books, and works on paper. Re-current themes address notions of cultural memory, of time and space and a considered approach to the relationship between objects, architecture, gardens, landscape and the places between – places to intervene, inhabit and above all activate. Whether it has been historic sites such as Musée Barthète, a small museum in France, or a museum like the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY or the deconstruction/reconstruction of a 19 th century book of botany using cyanotype, her intentions are to create sensory spaces, haptic experiences, transforming our perceptions and possible readings of space, time and memory.

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Cleave… a path in the wilderness

Cleave… a path into the wilderness (2016)

“Penelope Stewart was moved to create a simulation of a particular moment in the garden, that would be recognizable in the gallery. She worked with a fleeting sense of the peace and freedom one can feel as they walk through the leaves that have fallen in the autumn. Cleave… a path in the wilderness, created an immersive environment through smell and scale. Leaves, branches and vines fabricated out of beeswax dominated the gallery installation. The wax is a tool, a material, a conduit, as well as an inspiration. The history and knowledge of bees creating the wax adds to the depth of how human impressions are linked to the natural world yet at the same time are an imposition on natural orders.

Thousands of wax leaves were hung from a grid structure, until a room size tapestry of leaves was created. The process to make the leaves is a mundane one. Molds are made, wax is heated to just the right temperature and then poured into these silicone molds. The number of leaves that were made was an astounding 12,000. The mundane, repetitive labor to create the work is not new to contemporary sculpture. In 1980, Liz Magor made 2,500 newspaper brick for her work Production. She assembled a wall of these once newsworthy pieces of paper to create a monumental scale object of illegible pulp. Magor’s work broken down the stories of the day to forgotten meaningless material, yet, the work in making how the information is conveyed, the metal press to create each brick, is place beside the wall, and the public involved in the act of learning and sharing information, is brought to the front line of Production. Strength in numbers is a strong political force for protest as well as production. How collective working and bargaining creates a deeper, rich community. Stewart echoes this sentiment of what working togetherness can create both through metaphor of the leaves, vines and stones, the beeswax, her personal labor in creating the objects and by sharing the experience of mounting the work with the community.

In Cleave…a path into the wilderness, the placement of the leaves became a community activity. The gallery acted as an allegorical bee hive. Student and/or faculty would drop by for an hour or more or less to tie together groupings of leave. The leaves were instruments for the students and Stewart to create a memory of the natural world. People had their favorites; different groupings of leaf forms took place. A cluster of Oaks, or a section of Elms, Gingko pairs here and there, the leaf groupings became personal collections to all who put them up. The activity was an opportunity to share what expression could be, like the soft sweet honey that comes from the thousands of bees as they self-engineer the honeycombs.”

Curated by Natalie Olanick,

Warren G. Flowers Art Gallery, Dawson College, Montreal, Quebec. 2016

Robert Langen Art Gallery, Wilfred Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario. 2017

World of Threads, Oakville Ontario, 2018